Wanted – The Sonos Social Net

I have slowly but surely turned on a bunch of my friends to Sonos and Rhapsody. Hopefully for Sonos and Rhapsody, I’ve turned on a few of you all too.

Every single one my friends loves the combo. From anywhere in their home or apartment, with the Sonos wireless controller, they can play almost any song, artist, or album they want over their home stereo. It is the killer app for Rhapsody and all "music dial tone" services.

Several months ago I had lunch with a person who works on Rhapsody. He told me that the churn on Rhapsody subscriptions is pretty large when the user is listening on their computer. But when they listen on a device like Sonos, Slim, or Sansa, the churn is non existent. That’s because Rhapsody is only part of the killer solution. The other part is the listening device/environment. When your entire home is hooked up to a complete library of music in the sky, you have reached nirvana.

But there’s so much more potential that Rhapsody and Sonos haven’t tapped. Sonos needs a social net for its users. And we need it NOW!!

I enjoy finding new music and turning on others to it. I would like to "push" my music finds to all my friends who have Rhapsody and Sonos. I can do that with Rhapsody, but it’s clunky and not integrated into the Sonos controller. The Sonos controller needs a top menu item called "Friends" and one called "Recommendations".

I also want to record all my Sonos listens (like last.fm and yottamusic) and have them be there for my friends to look at and listen on their Sonos.

We are going to dinner at our friend’s house tonight. I’ve built a playlist in Rhapsody and we’ll play it on Rhapsody via his Sonos system.

But it took more work than it should to do this. It could be so much simpler.

None of this is that hard to build. There are a bunch of white label social net platforms out there and several of them are mentioned in Brad Stone’s piece in the NY Times today. Either build your own social net or hook up with one of these companies, but Sonos has to do this for me and my friends. ASAP.

As I said in my earlier post, software that isn’t natively social doesn’t work for me anymore.